The former is concerned with Windows Media Player. The venerable app, which has resolutely stuck at version 12 since the days of Windows 7, has suffered a little at the hands of Windows 10 build 17763.134 (aka the October 2018 Update, which finally appeared in November). According to the gang at Redmond, "users may not be able to use the Seek Bar", thanks to the gift of 1809. No more skipping to the good bits for you.

The paranoid, or those still clinging to the glory days of Windows Media Center, might regard this as evidence of an attempt to remove the aged player from the OS once and for all. Microsoft are certainly in no hurry to fix it, merely saying there will be a resolution in an "upcoming release".

In the meantime, it is probably time to finally ditch the poor old thing and move on to AV pastures new.

More serious is the latter issue: borked Win32 defaults. Windows allows users to specify a default app to use to open specific file types. This is now broken for some combinations of Win32 applications and certain files, although Microsoft is coy with exactly how widespread the issue is, saying:

"In some cases, Microsoft Notepad or other Win32 programs cannot be set as the default."

We were able to recreate the problem with Notepad but found the workaround – "In some cases, attempting to set application defaults again will succeed" – did indeed succeed. Microsoft is taking this issue sufficiently seriously to promise a fix in "late November" which is, er, now.

The issues can be categorised under "irritating" rather than the show-stoppers that accompanied the original release. However, both are indicative of the quality issues that are plaguing the Windows team. A prod in the Jenga stack that is the Windows OS breaking a very old in-box app is unfortunate. However, missing a bug in the default app selection, which afflicts the likes of Notepad of all things, is quite a bit more worrying. ®